Welcome to Public Health Is Weird—a series where I dig up some of history’s strangest (but true) public health stories. This one is about shoe store x-rays.
Watch the Reel
When X-Rays Became a Shoe Shopping Experience
Imagine walking into a shoe store, slipping on a new pair of shoes, and then stepping into an X-ray machine to see how well they fit.
As strange as it sounds today, that’s exactly what happened for decades in North America and Europe.
The machines were called shoe fluoroscopes (sometimes simply “fluoroscopes”), and they let customers see the bones of their feet inside their new shoes. At the time, it was considered modern, scientific, and even reassuring. Parents loved them. Kids thought they were fascinating. Salespeople used them as a selling point.
The future, apparently, involved standing on an X-ray machine while shopping.
The Problem
Unlike today’s carefully regulated medical imaging, shoe fluoroscopes often exposed not only the customer but also anyone standing nearby.
The amount of radiation varied considerably from machine to machine, and repeated use, especially by shoe store employees who operated the machines throughout the day, raised growing concerns about unnecessary radiation exposure.
Reports emerged of radiation-related skin injuries in some operators, and scientists began questioning whether the benefits came anywhere close to justifying the risks.
The Beginning of the End
As researchers learned more about the health effects of ionizing radiation, public health officials began pushing back.
My home state of Pennsylvania became the first U.S. state to ban shoe-fitting fluoroscopes in 1957. Other states and countries followed, and by the early 1970s, these machines had largely disappeared from shoe stores.
What had once symbolized scientific progress became an example of why new technologies should be evaluated not only for what they can do, but also for whether they’re necessary in the first place.
Public Health Lesson
One of public health’s hardest jobs is recognizing when yesterday’s “innovation” becomes today’s unnecessary exposure.
The shoe fluoroscope reminds us that good intentions and exciting technology don’t automatically equal good public health.
Sometimes protecting people means asking a simple question:
Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
And, of course, not letting profit get in the way of that answer.
Public Health Is Weird
History is full of strange health ideas that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. If you enjoy these stories, check out the rest of my Public Health Is Weird series for more surprising moments from the history of public health.
**Source for this blog & reel that goes into way more detail than I do: ORAU Museum of Radiation
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Also check out the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959
All in the Public Health is Weird Series here!
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